I've always had a problem with the concept of "intentional community," which is common in the poly communities I hang out in. The implications in my head about what the concept means and how it's put into practice leave me feeling trapped and judged. (Note: I think this is my own baggage, to a certain extent, and so I'm not trying to judge people who believe in it.)

I came up with the statement "I don't want an intentional community, I want an unintentional community" while watching Bagdad Cafe, which is one of my favorite movies, which is about unintentional community.

Unintentional community is a feeling of community that grows without your realizing it, rather than being consciously created.

An ambivert is someone who is sometimes an introvert and sometimes an extrovert. I seem to be one. I usually test as an introvert, but there are definitely times I'm energized by being around people.

David Case is my favorite reader of audio books. He's got the kind of voice that sounds good reading the back of a cereal box, but fortunately he chooses to read books that are a lot more interesting than that! My favorite audio book is his rendition of John Le Carré's The Night Manager.

I am in awe of Robert Graves's spiritual passion, as manifested in The White Goddess and other books.

The White Goddess is a lie from beginning to end, but it's a marvelous lie.

Big Handsome Men, yum! Bear of the Day usually features one. (Might not be work safe.)

Steampunk is a genre of science fiction. I think the name derived from cyberpunk. Here is a good explanation of the term.

China Miéville's Perdido Street Station is a really good example of the genre.

It's a theme I'm interested in that crops up in my spiritual practice and my writing.

http://www.peets.com is the SF Bay Area's home-grown gourmet coffee company. They started around the same time as Starbucks, compared to which their coffee is rich, dark, and strong.

*hisssss*

Uh... sorry, firecar... bad reaction on my part. :/

The whole story started when the OH and I discovered Iron Chef back in the mid-90s. A San Francisco chef named Ron Siegel battled on Iron Chef, and recreated the meal he made in his restaurant back home. The OH and I went to this meal and loved it. A while later, Ron Siegel moved to a new restaurant, called Masa's. So we went to Masa's to see what he was up to there. One of the dessert options was a selection of artisanal cheeses from around the world - cheeses handmade in small amounts, and in some cases from unpasteurized milk, which gives the cheese a more complex flavor (and I understand it's also technically illegal to import, but I guess restaurants have a way around that). The cheese tasting was one of the most sensual food experiences of my life.

When I was a manuscript editor at Yale University Press in the mid-80s, I edited a manuscript called Nonduality by David Loy. It included this quote:

The dharma of the dharma is that there are no dharmas. But now that the no-dharma dharma has been transmitted, how can the dharma of the dharma be a dharma?

For some reason that I have yet to be able to put into words very well, that has become a motto / philosophy of life for me.

I periodically get fascinated by something other people are fascinated by, partly by the sheer weirdness and wonder of it ("whoever thought this up and why are people so interested in it?") and partly by the sheer weight of detail that many hobbies involve. When I get fascinated by a hobby, I make a point of reading everything I can get my hands on about it, and I sometimes attend events, but (this is important for it to count as collecting) I don't actually get involved in doing the hobby myself.

Some hobbies I've collected recently: dog agility, Iditarod, sumo wrestling, lapidary.

I think the easiest way to explain it is in contrast to "doing." Sometimes I feel like people are always doing stuff and they forget to just be sometimes. Another way to put it:

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless
manner, you have learned how to live. --Lin Yutang

I'm pretty sure it was from here: http://www.dookyweb.com/avatars.swf
but not positive because the site is down.

Mutual degrumplement is a phrase that my sweetie kyubi and I made up for the way we magically make each other feel better even when we both start out in a bad mood.

Thanks for correcting the search code!

Glad you like the pin!